Watching the Rose Parade from Memorial Coliseum, 10 years after it was nearly demolished

Last Saturday's Rose Festival Grand Floral Parade (Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

If there is a signature song for Veterans Memorial Coliseum, perhaps it ought to be "Louie Louie."

Sure, you could make the case for the Trail Blazers' unofficial theme song, the instrumental one with the horns from the old TV broadcasts. Or you could go for an early Beatles song given that they (with apologies to Hendrix, Dylan and others) are arguably the crowning act to have played Memorial Coliseum.

But given that the history of "Louie Louie" and its origins neatly parallel the beginnings of the Coliseum itself, and that it's the most popular song recording ever to come out of Portland, you wouldn't go amiss choosing this Kingsmen standard. "Louie Louie" was written and first recorded by Richard Perry in 1955, about the same time the Coliseum was being conceived. It was re-recorded by The Kingsmen in 1963, at a studio in downtown Portland, just three years after the Coliseum's completion.

Then again, maybe I'm just feeling sentimental after attending the Rose Festival Grand Floral Parade last Saturday at the Coliseum with my mom, who is an endearingly big fan of marching bands and parades. "Louie Louie," I learned on Saturday, is still the marching-band song that seems to get everyone excited — at least the older crowd assembled here.

Why pay $15 or $30 plus astronomical Ticketmaster fees to see a parade you can see for free on the streets of Portland? For that reason, attendance at the Coliseum for the parade is sparse, maybe a couple thousand, as it has been in past years. But for many, it's a chance to have a guaranteed seat in a specific place that's out of the elements. I mean, it rains on Rose Parade day fairly often.

For me, of course, it was a chance not so much to see the parade as to experience Memorial Coliseum the way it was meant — on virtually the only it's possible.

For 363 or 364 days a year, a black curtain blocks the 360-degree view to the outside that's possible from the Coliseum's more than 10,000 seats. It's a one-of-a-kind architectural experience: a venue larger than a couple of Portland city blocks that's transparent on all four sides, in a way that's visible not just from the concourse but the arena bowl itself. But the Coliseum's operators are reluctant to open and close the curtains given their fragile nature, as a nearly 60-year-old mechanism. So it's only open for the Grand Floral Parade and sometimes a Portland Winterhawks matinee hockey game in January.

What it means to have the curtain open at a daytime event is that Coliseum attendees don't feel disconnected from the outside, like would be the case in practically any other arena ever built. Instead, the sunlight pours in. But it's too much of a wild card to touring acts that have never had to account for so much natural light before, so they keep it closed most of the time.

Interestingly, though, introducing natural light into large-scale arenas like NBA teams play in is an unmistakable architectural trend, as seen in recent arenas like the Sacramento Kings' Golden One Center. But it's still a fraction of the glass and transparency that exists at Memorial Coliseum with its curtain properly open. None of them close to giving you a 360-degree view outside like the Coliseum has. The closest I've ever encountered besides the Coliseum is the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin by the great Mies van der Rohe, completed in 1968 — eight years after the Coliseum. But it's an art museum, not an arena.

And of course there's a larger connection between these two buildings: Myron Goldsmith, the lead architect for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill on the Coliseum, studied under Mies. Goldsmith also designed Oracle Arena, where the Golden State Warriors will play their last game tonight, before moving to a new arena in San Francisco.

What occurred to me in days since last Saturday's parade at the Coliseum was that this was the first ticketed event I've attended since April, which marked the 10th anniversary of the grassroots to save the building from demolition.

A recent view of the Coliseum (Brian Libby)

Back in 2009, Mayor Sam Adams had introduced a plan to tear down the city-owned Coliseum in order to build a baseball stadium for the lower-minor-league Portland Beavers. The Beavers had played for decades in what's now Providence Park (originally Civic Stadium), but lost their home when it was converted to a soccer-only facility.

There's no doubt that the Providence Park conversion was a good idea, because it accompanied and enabled the Portland Timbers' jump to Major League Soccer, setting the table for the ensuing explosion of citywide Timbers and Thorns fandom. But building a minor league baseball stadium from scratch, in the center of the city? Come on. I mean, think of it this way if you're a baseball fan: had we built that stadium, it would now be arguably hindering the current effort to lure a Major League Baseball franchise and build a correspondingly MLB-caliber stadium.

And besides, from a strictly number standpoint, even after the Trail Blazers departed Memorial Coliseum in 1996 for the Rose Garden arena next door (now the Moda Center), the Coliseum remained busy, with well over 100 events a year. While the Moda Center became the first-choice venue for big touring acts as well as the Blazers' home, the Coliseum was quietly the only local venue in that slightly smaller range: bigger than the downtown theaters and auditoriums yet half the size of the Moda.

Credit Adams for ultimately backing away from the baseball-stadium plan after boisterous community opposition. Even I got involved, participating in the formation of what became known as the Friends of Memorial Coliseum. Adams initially explored a range of ideas through what was called a stakeholder advisory committee overseen by the Portland Development Commission (now Prosper Portland), many of them unrealistic and not viable, if not ridiculous. Water park, anyone? Peace garden?

What they discovered—they being not only Mayor Adams but his successor, Mayor Charlie Hales—was that no conversion of a multi-use arena to a single-use venue would make as much economic sense as simply letting the Coliseum do its thing. Mayor Hales did his part by commissioning a third-party economic study that found the arena would turn a profit with even a modest restoration. In fact, even after a very limited $5 million "refresh" in 2017, the building is already doing just that. If a full-scale restoration happened, something more in the $50-75 million range, the study estimated the Coliseum could generate some $2 billion in economic activity over the next 20 years.

You can't talk about Memorial Coliseum and the Moda Center without discussing what a dead zone the collective Rose Quarter property is, and how desperately it's in need of an urban-design fix. You don't need a master's degree in urban planning to see what the problem is, either. It's a trio of above-ground parking garages, one attached to the Moda Center itself and the other two across the street, blocking the two arenas' connection to Broadway, a streetcar-lined major thoroughfare. Actually, it's four garages, because there's also the One Center Court building between the arenas, which is really just a couple of office floors built onto another parking garage.

Last Saturday's Grand Floral Parade (Brian Libby)

There could be an urban-design textbook called What Not To Do and this wasteland of parking garages would likely be pictured on the cover.

Thankfully there's the Albina Vision, a community-driven initiative that's also rooted in very good urban design. It proposes a series of changes to the Rose Quarter that would not only make it a wonderful, pedestrian and greenspace-oriented space extending to the riverfront, but would also help restore the Albina neighborhood that unfortunately Memorial Coliseum, along with Emanuel Hospital and Interstate 5, largely demolished. Let's face it: like other midcentury urban renewal projects, Memorial Coliseum should have been built somewhere else, somewhere that didn't trample people's homes with a disturbing penchant for neighborhoods occupied largely by minorities. Yet continuing the cycle of destruction by demolishing a beautiful and useful and oft-used arena doesn't make things better. It makes them worse. That's why a restored Coliseum (or at least the presumption of it) is part of the Albina Vision.

Though it's tempting to stop and celebrate that the Coliseum has lived another decade, it's not really saved until it's truly restored. The economic case is already there and now it's a matter of City Council approving the funds. I've heard increased whispering that some funding could become available in the near future, more so than I've heard about in most of the past ten years. It could be one big funding package or a series of smaller restorations. But this also very well turn out to be a mirage given the lack of leadership City Council has shown over the past decade in fixing the Coliseum, particularly under Mayor Charlie Hales from 2013-17. For what it's worth, a majority of the current City Council members have expressed support for a Coliseum restoration.

It's all part of a larger puzzle emerging at the east end of the Broadway Bridge. There's a relatively new Portland Streetcar line, and streetcars are development tools even more than they are transportation. The Lloyd District is burgeoning into more of a high-density, mixed-use neighborhood just to the east, and just north of the Rose Quarter and the freeway overpasses, North and Northeast Portland are experiencing a wave of development. This under-utilized stretch of Broadway between the river and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, particularly when you add the adjacent Portland Public Schools site likely to be vacated in the years ahead, is so centrally located that it would be ridiculous for it not to become a place of increasingly tall buildings where housing, commercial and retail exist together with greenspace and public buildings like the two arenas.

As I sat in Row G at the Coliseum on Saturday, though, I wasn't thinking about economic impact or urban planning. I was enjoying amateur trumpet and trombone players and drummers marching straight through the floor of the arena, the only such parade-architectural mashup in the country if not beyond. I was looking at the tops of the trees peeking over the seating bowl and through the glass. Think about it: have you ever looked at trees from an arena before? That transparency and volume and light are what modern architecture is all about. And if it happens to the tune of "Louie Louie," as hand-made, flower-covered floats roll by, it makes for an endearing civic celebration in a glorious place. As a Generation X member, there's some part of me that is a little too cynical for rah-rah boosterism, but I really like the combination of this guileless parade in this heroically aspirational yet still slightly run-down landmark.

May they both be around for a long time.